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Thursday, 12 December 2013

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/02/vs-naipaul-jane-austen-women-writers"In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday about his career, Naipaul, who has been described as the "greatest living writer of English prose", was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: "I don't think so." Of Austen he said he "couldn't possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world".He felt that women writers were "quite different". He said: "I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me."The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women's "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world". "And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too," he said.He added: "My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don't mean this in any unkind way.""His comments can be broken up into 2 parts: 1/ On female writers:All of his arguments are refuted by this 1 essay alone: "Scent of a woman's ink" by Francine Prose- http://harpers.org/archive/1998/06/scent-of-a-womans-ink/.Ironically enough, the essay came out in 1998, 13 years before V. S. Naipaul's statement.1 of my favourite parts:"But can clever readers really tell a writer’s gender from his or her prose? In the spirit of scientific inquiry, let’s try the equivalent of a blind tasting. Let’s examine a series of passages for the telltale bouquet (sentiment, self-absorption, self-pity, humorlessness, narrowness, triviality) by which we might sniff out “the ink of the women.”Both of the selections below involve a confrontation between two characters, one in a state of physical duress so extreme as to inspire a real (or fantasized) deathbed confession:

Mrs. C., the on-duty nurse in the receiving room, was right out of Dickens, one of those eternal mothers, broad, sympathetic without being maudlin, and appallingly efficient, a woman whose very presence seems to heal. Listening—to my choked, fearful complaints, she helped me off with my jacket and shirt and onto the hard, white-sheeted leather table. . . . I repeated my words to Freddy: “I’m afraid, Mrs. C.—really afraid.” “Just lie still.” “Look here,” I demanded, by now half crazy with fear and upset with what I interpreted as her dour indifference, “have I had—I mean, am I having some kind of attack?” . . . One can imagine the kind of thing I wanted to say: “Look, if anything should happen, tell my mother I loved her—and my wife—well, tell her in my way I loved—no, she won’t believe that. Tell her—well, tell her I’m sorry.”

The man was trying to say something but he was only wheezing. Haze squatted down by his face to listen. “Give my mother a lot of trouble,” he said through a kind of bubbling in his throat. “Never giver no rest. Stole theter car. Never told the truth to my daddy or give Henry what, never give him…” “You shut up,” Haze said, leaning his head closer to hear the confession. “Told where his still was and got five dollars for it,” the man gasped. “You shut up now,” Haze said. “Jesus…” the man said. “Shut up like I told you to now,” Haze said. “Jesus hep me,” the man wheezed. Haze gave him a hard slap on the back and he was quiet. He leaned down to hear if he was going to say anything else but he wasn’t breathing any more. Haze turned around and examined the front of the Essex to see if there had been any damage done to it. The bumper had a few splurts of blood on it but that was all. Before he turned around and drove back to town, he wiped them off with a rag.

Although the reference to a wife in the first passage suggests a male point of view, it should be otherwise obvious that a woman wrote it. Observe the claustrophobic intimacy of the first person, the emotionality, the hyped-up intensity of the adjectives, most of which describe feelings (sympathetic, choked, fearful, half crazy with fear), the self-conscious, self-correcting (“tell her in my way I loved…”) solipsism of the unspoken confession, the sentimentality with which the narrator surrenders to the Dickensian “eternal mother,” the breathlessness of the syntax, the hazy vagueness of detail, the merciless focus on the self.The second selection is, as obviously, the work of a man—though we must imagine what manly writing is, since no one has explained how, precisely, a writer deploys “the remnant of his balls” at the word processor. These cool, hard-boiled, distanced, third-person sentences turn their unblinking eye on a man dying horribly. His incoherent confession is punctuated by his confessor’s (and murderer’s) bullying demands that he shut up. There are almost no adjectives (“hard” is the most notable modifier), nor much emotion, any sentimentality (sentiment is undercut—sliced through—by the implacability of those “shut up”s), the whole grisly scene culminating in the hard slap, the “male” supposition that a human life is worth less than the specter of damage to one’s vehicle, the giddiness of that made-up word splurt, and the fastidious attention to the smears of blood on the bumper.In fact, the gender of these authors is the opposite of what I’ve suggested. The first passage comes from Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, a memoir-novel that, in the three decades since its publication, has assumed an iconic status thanks to its painfully honest portrait of a certain sort of male writer and career alcoholic. The second is from Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor, the writer who shocked Ozick’s students by turning out to be female.And if we move beyond these passages to consider the whole books, everything keeps subverting our stereotypical expectations. O’Connor takes the aerial view, gazing down from above, charting the mysterious wriggling of her tiny, comical humans as they scurry about, looking for salvation in all the wrong places. Unlike a humorless girl writer, O’Connor is hilarious, structuring long scenes so that their jokes keep building. She’s not terribly engaged by psychology or the subtleties of motivation, or by that abiding female obsession: romantic love. She is more concerned with questions of grace and free will, with destiny, with sin and mercy—in a word, with metaphysics; she’s less intent on stamping a tiny foot against God than on listening for the footfall of the rather larger foot that God is stamping against us.If O’Connor’s work resembles aerial photography, Exley’s suggests a sonogram, or images from a brain scan: interior, self-monitoring, charting each subtle psychic shift, each degree of damage. His writing has all the pleasures and drawbacks of the barroom monologue: the overlong rant of the guy propped up on the next stool. There are passages of real eloquence, sections so raw and undefended that they make your skin crawl; but there are also the inevitable repetitions, the rambling, the maddening inability to comprehend the seemingly simple fact of another’s being."I was also fooled, by the way. This is a brilliant essay. A must read. 2/ On Jane Austen- "her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world":Such pride, such prejudice, such wrong assumptions. In a distance, one may have the wrong impression that Jane Austen's novels are sentimental because they deal with romance and have happy endings and are popular among young, romantic, even sentimental girls and women, yet in fact, Jane Austen's not only non-sentimental but anti-sentimental and realistic, with a cool, detached tone and an apparent dislike of melodrama and "sappy" language.To be honest, I used to think the same, and for many years before reading her books, had some prejudices about her writing romance novels, thinking pink and creating perfect characters... All of these have been proven to be myths. Now, I would agree that Jane Austen's world is a confined one, in which politics, war, slavery, plantations, Industrial Revolution, philosophy... are avoided and people outside the gentry class are only in the background. That is why I haven't reversed my opinion that she's somewhat overrated*, even though lately I've reevaluated "Sense and sensibility", and at the same time I don't strike out the possibility that when reading V. S. Naipaul I may see why he's awarded the Nobel prize and that he's superior to Jane Austen, but V. S. Naipaul's statement suggests that he hasn't really read any of her books and is probably content with watching the film adaptations. (The bitter old man doesn't realise that her books are satires of foibles in human beings and he, when attacking her and other female writers, shows such foibles- pride and prejudice and the inability to understand that things are not always what they seem. In fact, I would love to know how Jane Austen would react to such asinine remarks. That sharp tongue of hers. She would say something biting to shut him up, or just laugh and put him into her new novel). *: Which is to say, that Jane Austen's overrated and that the Janeite phenomenon is incomprehensible has been my opinion for a while until lately when I reread many passages in "Sense and sensibility". At the moment, my attitude is rather ambivalent and I cannot say anything until I have stopped swinging and chosen a definite side.

Update on 13/12: I had a talk with Arnav, an Indian friend of mine, about V. S. Naipaul and this is what he said:

"ahhimhe is goodread his house for mr.biswasits beautifulrest are stupid because he is a xenophobelike certain indianshe is concerned with a pastthat may or may not have existedand his books are a lament for that pasthe does not realise that this invention of tradition was responsible for one of the worst genocides in indiahe does not realise that what he is doing is not humanism at allbut driving wedges, creating riftsamongst peoplehe does not realisethat past does not existu always create and re-create the pastwith the present as the vantage pointand this presentis always fracturedhe might have the most brilliant english prosebut his understanding is zeroa bitter old manthats what he isin his latter booksparticularly the india trilogyhe is obsessed with what India stands forand so he goes on a questat first, in the first bookhe is overwhelmed with the dirt and mirethat characterizes indiahe is overwhelmed by the chaosand tries to seek refuge in historyin a particular hindu historycharacterised by victimhoodu will hear discourses after discoursesabout how the hindu civilizationwas run down by the alien intrudersthe muslims primarilybut it is an inventionan invention of traditionfirst and foremost, India never was a monolithheck india didn't even exist earlierit was a congeries of city statesof loose kingdomshe sees history as a confrontationas a clashbut history is so much besides thatit is assimilation, confrontation, degradation,it rises and fallshistory is also symbiosishistory is also syncretismhis books in ignoring such complexityboils down to an angry ranta replaying of victimhoodwe have an organizationcalled the RSSdoing the samepoliticallyand these points got concretised in 2002when Gujarat, a statesaw a massive massacre of muslimsthe same got replayed a few months backin a state called Uttar pradeshall done by the Hindusso u seeit's really not that easy[...] he never lived in india, neverhe just visited ithe is an interesting writer as a case studylike knut hamsun wasa complete nazi sympathizer[...]my position is that u can never divorce ur writing from ur politicsits an impossibilitypolitics is a world viewhow can u separate ur world view from ur writing?"

Note

I today am not accountable for every single post on this blog. Besides all the posts written and published in anger or excitement, it has happened quite often that I discussed a topic and supported a view only to change my mind a few weeks or months (or years) later, especially in literature (view on Jane Austen, Nabokov, The French Lieutenant's Woman, etc). Therefore, people coming across this blog should be reminded that the opinions I held at some point in my life are not necessarily my opinions now. Thank you.